At first glance, the tornado of discourse hitting the internet recently seems like pretty routine stuff. A Hollywood starlet—in this case Euphoria’s Sydney Sweeney—ends up in hot water over a dicey PR mishap, and commentators clutch their pearls. The political climate that led us here, and online machinations bubbling below the surface, however, make it a bit stickier than that.
For those not up to speed, the furore revolves around a play on words in an ad where Sweeney flogs jeans for American Eagle. Lounging couquettish-ly as a camera pans over her denim-clad body, Sweeney tells us that genes are responsible for, among other things, hair colour (in her case blonde) and eye colour (hers are blue). This is followed with the tagline ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.’
The coupling of the phrase ‘great genes,’ a staple of the eugenicist movement, with emphasis on the actress’ Aryan features, does make it hard to escape racist connotations. Since its release, TikTok users have parodied the ad by acting out its script while sporting blue eye filters or, in Doja Cat’s case, a hillbilly accent—eventually causing such a stir that the White House felt the need to get involved. The major question since has been whether the ad’s implications were simply a major faux pas, or a sign of something more sinister.
It would be easier to write it off as the former if it weren’t for Dunkin’ Donuts releasing an ad with an almost identical message just a few days later. This time, The Summer I Turned Pretty actor Gavin Casalegno tells us that his tan is, “Genetics. I just got my colour analysis back. Guess what? Golden summer, literally.” On the face of things, the idea that this could be anything other than a major oversight seems unthinkable. And yet, over the past few years, eugenicist theory has subtly invaded many sectors of Western society, often in ways that initially offer plausible deniability.
Online, this has largely taken the form of phrenology and physiognomy. Both pseudosciences that falsely calculate an individual’s traits and value through analysis of their bone structure (with phrenology basing this on the ridges of the skull, and physiognomy on other facial features). These practices were popularized by those who advocated for slavery, and later Nazis, to justify the annihilation those whose bodies they deemed unfit for civil society.
In the darker corners of the internet, this idea has been repurposed in unsettling ways—white supremacists call for more “Viking-like” phenotypes, incels promote “looksmaxxing” (the belief that one’s “sexual market value” hinges on traits like inter-pupillary distance or the presence of so-called “witch skulls” and “angel skulls”), and “transvestigators” insisting that all celebrities are secretly trans, overlaying photos with skull diagrams as supposed scientific proof.
While these ideas might seem outlandish to anyone outside niche, cult-like sectors of the internet, subtler versions are permeating into mainstream culture. The neon, geometric phrenology posts of pick-up artist Rivelino have become prolific enough to inspire the viral ‘green line test’ meme; terms like “mewing” and “mogging” (borrowed from looksmaxxing) have entered everyday vernacular; and Kim Kardashian’s Skims recently debuted its ‘sculpt face wrap,‘ a vaguely Amish-looking beige snood marketed to physically reshape one’s head into a more “ideal” form.
On TikTok, eugenic ideas like these slip even further under the radar. Trends that dissect whether users have “doe eyes” or “siren eyes” put a physiognomic twist on the old Madonna–whore complex, deciding if young women are either innocent or a temptress based on eye shape. Similar meaning is assigned to “hunter eyes” versus “herbivore eyes,” or to features likened to a cat, fox, deer, or bunny—fueling claims that high, foxy cheekbones signal intelligence, while large, doe-like eyes indicate grace.
Outside far-right circles, most people might dismiss these trends as no more harmful than a personality quiz or a Myers–Briggs type. But that veneer of cheap fun is exactly what made similar pseudosciences so pervasive in the Victorian era, when phrenology booths eventually becoming standard carnival fare. Now, just as then, the game quickly turns overtly racist. One trend popular on both TikTok and in incel forums is the analysis of canthal tilt—the upward or downward slant of the eyes—labeling an upward “positive” tilt as desirable and a downward “negative” tilt as undesirable. This framing is rooted in anti-Asian racism and carries dangerous consequences: Reddit threads claim that a positive tilt gives you “predator eyes,” while a negative tilt marks you as “prey.” As one commenter put it under an image of “prey eyes,” “If I saw u on the street I’d kick ur [sic] ass with eyes like that.”
Modern eugenics isn’t just limited to phrenology, either. Having already brought back such hot, vintage 18th-century trends like measles and diphtheria, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. jumped on the eugenics bandwagon in May, proposing a database of people with autism, a disability he’s previously described as a “preventable disease.” Meanwhile, pronatalism—a movement obsessed with boosting birth rates (and, in many cases, producing “better” babies)—is rife among Silicon Valley tech bros. Championed by everyone from Elon Musk to Donald Trump, pronatalist’s panic over declining birth rates is at odds with the global population being at a record high. But since the countries with shrinking populations are overwhelmingly white-majority, while African and Asian nations continue to grow, it’s not exactly shocking that pronatalism overlaps neatly with the “great replacement” theory, a conspiracy endorsed by Hungarian president Viktor Orbán, imagines a heroic assembly line of Western babies pumping out just enough fresh white people to maintain dominance over non-white countries.
Malcolm and Simone Collins, the Instagram-ready poster couple for pronatalism, wade even deeper into the eugenics pool by selecting which frozen embryos to implant based on the health and intelligence scores in their genomes (a practice that’s illegal in the UK). Elon Musk, father of fourteen, has faced similar accusations of using genetic selection through IVF—though in his case, to produce male children. As Musk’s daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson posted on Threads earlier this year: “My assigned sex at birth was a commodity that was bought and paid for. So when I was feminine as a child and then turned out to be transgender, I was going against the product that was sold.”
What adds to concern over the American Eagle ad is the fact that Sweeney has repeatedly been accused of courting right-wing audiences like these in the past. This campaign is just the latest in a string of leery, Bush-era-raunch brand campaigns she’s fronted. The not-so-subtle political messaging was seemingly confirmed last week when BuzzFeed added a wrinkle to the discourse this week, uncovering that Sweeney is a registered Republican.
Some insist the uproar over the ad is an overreaction, but it’s important to note that the same was said about Musk’s Nazi salute, and for years the Collins’ were given the benefit of the doubt by the media about their baby-making motives. Seen together, the suggestion—subtle or not—that blue eyes and blonde hair are desirable traits doesn’t feel as far-fetched. It feels like a pattern. And it’s one that’s been hiding in plain sight for far too long.